Road Safety: West Midlands

Debate between Mark Sewards and Manuela Perteghella

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Manuela Perteghella (Stratford-on-Avon) (LD)]

I am bringing forward this debate because of the many fatalities on the roads in the west midlands, and the catastrophic consequences of collisions and crashes. In seconds, happy worlds are turned upside down, lives are destroyed and families are left grieving their loved ones. My constituents are dying on the roads as a direct result of successive Governments’ inaction on tackling the scourge of speeding and dangerous driving, and I intend to set out exactly what must change.

Let me begin with an example that has stayed with me. On 19 May, a constituent contacted me to say that drivers on a road near them were regularly travelling at more than double the 30 mph speed limit. They were frightened, and they wanted something done, so I wrote to the Government to raise their concerns. The response I received was that the Department for Transport was not at that time considering any changes to the data used in assessing road safety interventions. On the same day that the response arrived, there was a fatal accident on that road—and that was the third death on south Warwickshire roads in a few days.

The Government must change their approach to road safety and intervene to save lives on our roads. They must also safeguard and consider all road users, and any new measures must protect vulnerable users such as pedestrians, walkers, cyclists and roller skaters, and ensure that funding for active travel infrastructure is available to communities so that people can enjoy safe walking, cycling and horse riding. Why must cycling infrastructure cost millions of pounds? Why is it so difficult to have separate and well-marked cycle and active travel lanes in Britain?

I welcome the Government’s road safety strategy, published in January. It is ambitious in its aim to cut the number of people killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads by 65% by 2035 and by 70% for children under 16. Yet a strategy without teeth is not a strategy at all. The Government need to commit to radical solutions; tinkering at the edges is no longer sufficient. The scale of death and serious injury on our roads demands bold, evidence-based action—and it demands that now. We need national legislation that is properly enforceable, that sets clear thresholds for interventions on dangerous roads and that does not leave communities at the mercy of local councils that are failing in their duty of care.

[Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)]

Although the debate is about road safety in the west midlands, many of the lessons that the hon. Lady talks about will apply nationwide, including in Leeds South West and Morley. Does she share my frustration that some councils rely on mean average speed data to determine whether to make adjustments on certain roads? As a maths teacher, I really appreciate the mean, but it hides the outliers. If we have 100 outliers out of 10,000 cars, that still makes for a dangerous road. Does she agree that councils should change their approach?

Video Games: Consumer Law

Debate between Mark Sewards and Manuela Perteghella

Monday 3rd November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mark Sewards]

When the boundary review took place a few years ago, I was very disappointed that Rockstar Leeds was not drawn into my constituency, so I am very jealous of that. However, I do have constituents who work there and I agree entirely with my hon. Friend’s point—it is as though he has read on a few pages in my speech. People absolutely can have private servers that take care of the issue. It does not require the developer to keep things running or to put their own resources endlessly into a game to keep it alive. Consumers can do that themselves.

As I was saying, the publisher should have a duty to ensure that a game purchased and owned by a consumer remains playable in some way. That is not about burdening publishers or Government overreach. It is about ensuring that publishers do not have the right deliberately to disable products that people have already paid for. I suspect that if we were talking about mobile phones or any of the other things I listed earlier, this debate would resonate even more strongly, but the principle is the same. If we do not act now, the use of this model and the erosion of ownership rights may spread to other areas. History is littered with examples of Governments acting too late and finding out that what could have been fixed early, with minimal effort, has grown into a much larger problem. The warning signs are there in this industry and to act now would be far less painful than to wait until the practice has become entrenched.

As we know, consumers are noticing. Campaigns have started. We are here today because nearly 200,000 people in the UK signed a petition demanding action on this specific issue. The Stop Killing Games campaign, a consumer movement started by YouTuber Ross Scott, has shone a light on this issue, not just here in the UK but across Europe and beyond. The European citizens’ initiative on the issue received more than 1.4 million signatures. This is not a niche concern among a few people; a growing movement of consumers feel that their rights are being undermined.

My office has corresponded with Ross, and I am very grateful for the information he gave me ahead of the debate. He really is a champion of these issues. I have also done my own research, and would like to go through some examples, the first of which is “The Crew”. The game was released in 2014 and on average cost consumers between 40 and 60 quid. It sold about 12 million copies, but in 2024 it was shut down, with no way for people to play it. To its credit, Ubisoft offered refunds to recent purchasers, but certainly not to the original ones. Although largely an online game, it had a single-player component that was unplayable when the servers went down.

Another example, which Ross gave me, is “LawBreakers”—a game that I imagine would have been popular with certain Members of the previous Parliament. It survived for a year before it was shut down in 2018. In the case of “Babylon’s Fall”, there were no refunds, despite the game being unplayable less than a year after launch. It may not have been the best game, but the principle still stands. It was made, sold and then pulled, with no refunds.

Just this summer, it was announced that “Anthem” will no longer be playable from January next year—only a few months away. As of December 2023, it had sold 5 million copies and made more than $100 million in digital revenue. An additional $3.5 million had been spent on in-game purchases. All that money is now gone. Meanwhile, other games, such as “Guild Wars”, have been running for more than 20 years and are still going strong. The point is clear, even though the industry is not. There is no standard, no transparency, and no certainty for consumers.

In response to the petition, the Government have said that they have

“no plans to amend…consumer law”.

Although I respect the Government’s position, I cannot help but observe that what is happening in this space could be perceived as a breach of consumer protection under unfair trading regulations. Those regulations prohibit traders from hiding information that consumers need in order to make an informed choice, yet when consumers buy a game today, they are almost never told how long it will remain functional. Consumers are sold a one-time purchase, but the publisher reserves the right to terminate it at any time for any reason.

[Manuela Perteghella]

One of my constituents has written to me about feeling misled when the industry uses the word “buy” for video games that can later disappear from their digital library. Does the hon. Member agree that we need transparency, so that consumers know exactly what they are paying for at the point of purchase? We need clarity that “buy” means “buy”, and not “borrow until it is revoked”.

[Mark Sewards]

I could not agree more. That goes back to my earlier point: the fix in this area could be as simple as there being more transparency. When a consumer purchases a game, it should be crystal clear that the publisher could deactivate it at any point. However, I want to go further—we need to retain something and ensure that publishers make the game playable for consumers long after they have pulled support from it.

Going back to “The Crew”, the game did not need to be shut down. Ubisoft could have patched in offline play or allowed private servers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) said earlier. Going forward, the ask from many consumers is simple: if the industry plans to kill a game, it should ensure that consumers have a reasonable option to continue using their products for a single-player experience or on private servers.

I promised one of my Leeds South West and Morley constituents that I would raise the fact that they, like other gamers, have waited years for certain games, including the remake of “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic”, which I am told is one of the greatest games of all time. Saber Interactive plans to release the final version of that game at some point in the future, but let us imagine how devastated those gamers would be if Saber released it only to pull it a year later.

We are not talking about a small, powerless industry; we are talking about publishers that generated a combined total of $455 billion in revenue last year accounting for all types of gaming. By most industry measures, the global video games sector is now larger than the film and music industries combined. Analysts at Forbes say that gaming is now the dominant entertainment industry, so the costs of ensuring long-term playability are negligible when compared with the budgets of these major publishers. We are talking about tens of thousands of pounds—or sometimes nothing at all—set against budgets in the tens and hundreds of millions, and revenue in the billions.

To be clear: this is not just about video games. Our greatest fan across the Atlantic, Elon Musk, has already shown us with Tesla that features in cars can be remotely disabled even after the original buyer has paid for them. The technology already exists to remotely modify products in a way that the consumer may not have been reliably informed about at purchase. What is stopping the progression of those modifications to render purchases totally and utterly unusable? Do we really want to wait until our phones, fridges and cars are affected before we act in this small way, in what is a relatively small area?

My ask today is simple: I urge the Government to revisit this issue and meaningfully engage with the asks of the petition. It is not too late to change the law or issue guidance in some way on what should happen with games that go offline. If we fail to act, the future consequences for consumers, especially in the age of digital ownership, could be significant. This is about putting people first—a proud tradition of the Labour party, of which I am a proud member—and ensuring that consumer rights are protected not just today, but in the future. It is very clear that when consumers buy something, it should be theirs to keep, not just until the seller decides otherwise.